There will not be another season of our live action Dirk Gently. There may however be, one day, an animated spin-off. We are working on it and have been for almost 5 years now, but the route has been complicated. But Dirk Gently doesn’t mind complicated routes.

Last updated: July 12, 2024 13:48

Answer from Arvind:

I first met Douglas when I was 18, when I (with my friend James Goss) adapted the first Dirk Gently book as a student play and invited him to see it. To the my unexpected delight (and terror), he turned up, and to my even greater surprise, he seemed to quite like it saying that it had made him think for the first time that there might be a TV show in Dirk Gently, and that he should get around to making it sometime. 20 years later I would make it for him.

We became, if not friends exactly, certainly friendly. I was in awe of his genius and his creativity, and he enjoyed my youthful enthusiasm and energy and perhaps he also enjoyed that I was in awe of his genius.

He started inviting me to events and to meet his collaborators. I interned at his production company, helped play-test his new computer game (or rather, because I didn’t like computer games, got my younger brother to do so), I got to observe him at work: being copied in on emails and sitting in on meetings with his CEO, Robbie Stamp and the other senior management team of his production company, The Digital Village.

I was even invited to the odd party and gradually over the years I got to know his friends: people like Neil Gaiman, David Baddiel, Stephen Fry, Lenny Henry, WiReD magazine founder Ian Charles Stewart, venture capitalist Thomas Hoegh and other legends of comedy, writing, innovation and technology who would in later years become my collaborators and friends and help shape and direct my career.

Like so many, I was bereft when Douglas died – the first inkling that 2001 was going to be a very bad year indeed – and for a while my career meandered away from its Adams-ian origins.

Over the past decade though, as the real world has grown ever more terrifying and seemingly unpredictable; as everything everywhere from AI and Climate Change to political chaos have threatened on a daily basis to blow up the earth for real, I have found myself drawn gradually back into the Adams-verse. First as an escape, just to take comfort from re-reading familiar lines, but then increasingly it pulled me in professionally also. As a film and TV and theatre maker, I set about the task of adapting his books into other mediums.

I started, once again, with Dirk Gently. Douglas had never got around to making the TV show version, so 20 years after our first meeting, I did so – giving the holistic detective to millions as his own Netflix show, comic book and card game; and as I write this, I’m on the final steps of a multi-year mission in search of adventure, excitement and really wild things…

Along the way, I found myself giving the 2020 Douglas Adams memorial lecture, contributing essays to several books about him and swimming joyfully through the Douglas Adams archive held by his old Cambridge College, St. John’s.

This deep immersion in Douglas’ thinking had an unexpected effect: it made the trash-fire of the real world more bearable. In his ideas, I found tools to understand and navigate the chaos unfolding around me. Spending time in Douglas’ brain served as an antidote to the existential background panic that we have all been forced to endure.

This audiobook is my attempt to share that antidote.

But don’t worry, Stephen Fry will be in the book too…

Last updated: September 16, 2024 18:33

Over the past decade as the real world has grown ever more terrifying and seemingly unpredictable; as everything everywhere from AI and Climate Change to political chaos have threatened on a daily basis to blow up the earth for real, Douglas’ writing and thinking seems more desperately needed than ever. More than ever we need his perspective, his ability to see things differently and to repeat in a calm, repetitive whisper, the Guide’s famous mantra: DON’T PANIC.

On issue after issue, on each and every one of the crises that define our time, Douglas Adams got there first. He saw the future in all its beauty and terror, and he cocked his giant head sideways, squinted to change the perspective, and then he sat down in front of the blank pages he usually feared so much, to describe the future that was coming.

Occasionally, when what he saw coming was especially bleak, he made a suggestion about how one might fix it. This audiobook will attempt to let him whisper those suggestions into your ears.

Last updated: September 16, 2024 18:33

The economic model for podcasts and audiobooks is underpressure. Most podcasts don’t make money. Most Audiobooks are dependent on Audible and Amazon. We wanted to find a way to do this independently. Prodigal has been involved with a few Kickstarter campaigns before and learnt a lot from them. Pushkin has never done one but is always looking for new ways to connect with its listeners directly. The combination just made sense.

Last updated: July 11, 2024 06:17

Because a) Douglas Adams was obsessed with audio and b) The audio tapes in his archive were sitting unheard. That combination just seemed wrong and an audiobook was the simplest way of righting that wrong.

Last updated: July 03, 2024 13:01

We have currently estimated our shipping rates using Shipstation (an established shipping service with scale discounts) from our location in California. We do not add any additional surcharge and are not generating any revenue from the shipping component of our rewards.

Last updated: September 18, 2024 13:12

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Last updated: September 18, 2024 13:13